Honeybees aren’t native to North America [2]. The native pollinators, such as bumblebees, are outcompeted by honeybee hives [3]. Those honeybees then selectively pollinate certain plants, reducing biodiversity further [4].
Honeybees, however, unlike local pollinators, can be industrially distributed to industrial agriculture. So they get a lobby. Meanwhile, well-meaning folks put a honey beehive in their backyard and inadvertently wipe out the local bumblebee and butterfly populations.
Mason Bees are hilarious bees native to North America that don't fly very well, so they just kinda dive-bomb flowers to get pollen. This is important because that heavy slam (well, heavy for a flower) is enough to distribute pollen into the air. These bees are fat, fuzzy, and winter over by crawling into holes and sealing themselves inside with some mud-spit.
It's VERY easy to create homes for these guys - if you've ever seen someone with a large log that has lots of little holes drilled in it, they were likely prepping a Mason Bee habitat. Ideally, they burrow into hollow, dry grass stems that broke off at some point in the fall.
I try to tell people about this bee because it's so easy to make homes for them. Just make sure to move the home every year, or it becomes too easy for predators to find them.
edit: also worth mentioning this bee is so docile, it usually only stings when it's squeezed or wet, and its sting is very light, and the hook is unbarbed. Better than honey bees in so many ways.
tptacek · 2h ago
During the season we had a bunch of mason bee nests inside the hollow metal of our porch furniture. Supposedly, mason bees can sting, but the sting is barely perceptible.
troyvit · 2h ago
I wonder what it would be like to have a giant Mason Bee hotel in a riparian buffer strip alongside a plot. One problem would be as you point out that predators could find them easily. Another might be that pollinating one crop doesn't do enough for a mason bee all season long.
We have some of those in our wild crazy yard. I gotta build me some homes for them because you're right they are so cute.
catlikesshrimp · 1h ago
I thought you meant "Giant mason bee" which is not native in north america, is an endangered species and whose jaws might not appeal to the uninitiated.
onetimeusename · 44m ago
Not to be confused with mining or carpenter bees that also like logs. My mom's yard has some carpenter bees that live in the ground. They are as big as bumble bees but more black and a male drone hovers around in a certain area above the females and will dive bomb other male carpenter bees. The male bees will follow you around if you go into their area but they never stung anyone.
mattgrice · 2h ago
I've got a ton of mason bee tubes. They are awesome.
To use a silicon valley analogy, nobody has figured out how to scale out mason bees. Not to the > 200sq miles of pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds owned by the Resnicks. The Resnicks funded some in-house research and apparently considred it a failure.
It's probably possible. Might not even be hard once you know the trick, but it's certainly not a slam-dunk.
giantg2 · 2h ago
Supposedly, it only takes 250 mason bees to do the same pollination as 10,000 honeybees. I think there are people working on scaling this. The honey business is secondary to the pollination money, so having pollination done without having to truck around large hives, could be a big deal.
morgoths_bane · 2h ago
You have now convinced me to be the biggest supporter of mason bees now, thank you.
pamelafox · 2h ago
I love native bees, I've been trying to find ways to incorporate native bee facts into my tech talks. The "Insect Crisis" book was a nice overview of issues like overuse of honeybees, plus others. Highly recommend planting native pollinator-friendly plants in garden if you want to meet adorable, hilarious, beautiful native bees!
If you pay close attention in Seattle, you'll find that bumblebees are particularly fond of making nests in the hollows of the loose boulder retaining walls that are still in fashion in the region. It's hard to catch them because they have much smaller numbers per nest and thus less traffic per minute, but they do.
WalterBright · 2h ago
I let the wildflowers grow in my lawn, and in the summer there's a constant hum from the bees. I enjoy the sound and their industriousness.
My only problem is the invasive plants which are determined to overwhelm everything.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
Out of left field, but do you have any sources on developing small riparian environments to promote dragonfly populations?
I recently learned that a popular anti-mosquito trick by painters in my area is to put a fake dragonfly on their cap. Which led me to wonder where the actual buggers have gone.
hinkley · 2h ago
They're all in my yard, and I honestly don't know why. I'm almost half a mile from the nearest wetland. I think it's tall weeds. They seem to be like cats and want to perch on high spots.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> They seem to be like cats and want to perch on high spots
I love this.
mc32 · 1h ago
Unfortunately, so do ticks... (grass blades)
giantg2 · 2h ago
"The native pollinators, such as bumblebees, are outcompeted by honeybee hives"
... in urban environments, and it' still debatable. Your #2 source provides additional details.
There are a lot of other dubious claims here that the sources seemed to contradict each other.
Something you didn't bring up is that people raising honeybee can benefit other pollinators due to changes in human behavior such as planting beneficial plants and refraining from pesticide use.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> in urban environments, and it' still debatable
In all environments.
The source argues this competition is fine in urban environments because we’ve already displaced the native pollinators there.
giantg2 · 2h ago
Please read your #2 source. That one says competition is fine in rural areas because carrying capacity is still sufficient. This might be different than your #3 source, hence the comment about contradictory sources.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> read your #2 source. That one says competition is fine in rural areas because carrying capacity is still sufficient
Do you mean No. 3, the Oregon State University article?
No. 2, the USGS article, explicitly says "honey bees are also significant competitors of native bees and should not be introduced in conservation areas, parks, or areas where you want to foster the conservation of native plants and native bees."
(As for the Oregan State University article, the word rural never appears. It's focussed on urban areas, where honeybees have a smaller foraging radius and native bees are largely extinct. The carrying capacity argument only applies "during periods of abundant pollen and nectar.")
giantg2 · 1h ago
Yes,my prior comment reversed numbers 2 and 3.
"Only half of the studies pointed to a negative impact of competition, and most of the negative impacts were studies where wild bees changed their visitation rate on certain flowers. It has yet to be demonstrated how competition may result in a long-term change in the composition of bee species in an environment."
You wouldn't find the term rural because they use the term wildlands.
The studies used in the Oregon article are not all urban focused and included studies investigating increased competition in varying habitat, finding "As the California study demonstrated, increased competition may cause bee species to switch their foraging patterns, resulting in little impact on their overall reproductive success."
And yes, any conservation area will not promote the inclusion of non-native species regardless of their impact. Just becuase they are competitors doesn't show that they have negative impacts.
tptacek · 2h ago
People can plant beneficial plants without introducing invasive competitors.
giantg2 · 2h ago
They can, but they don't. You missed the point. Awareness through exposure to beekeeping can change human behavior in a beneficial way. If you read some of the previously linked articles, you will see that it is still debateable if the competitors are actually causing any real problems for native bees. If the problems are debatable and on a low scale, then it's possible the benefits are a net positive.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> can, but they don't
Do we have evidence backyard beekeeping promotes these behaviours better than directly messaging folks to plant pollinator-friendly gardens? (Genuine question.)
giantg2 · 54m ago
I don't know of any studies looking at this specifically, but there are numerous groups and programs that use honeybees as an outreach tool for environmental education. There are studies about the effectiveness of experiential learning vs classroom only learning. One indicator that this is working is the fact that most people in general think about honeybees when you say the bees or pollinators are dying. The steps of reducing pesticide use and planting pollinator friendly yards is universally beneficial.
It's true but honey bees are still extremely economically important. And very useful because their hives are large and portable.
The billionaire Resinick pomegranate/pistachoi/almond oligarchs put quite a bit of effort into native bees which seemed quite successful but they shut it down I think about 5 years ago. I can't find the article now. Gen X+ might remember them as owners of the 'Franklin Mint' hawkers of knickknacks you either are or soon will be throwing into a dumpster.
They are BTW also largest renters of honeybee hives in the US.
tptacek · 3h ago
Right, it's interesting from a technical perspective, but it's a story about battery-farmed livestock, not about North American ecology. My guess is they'll figure out how to keep growing more bees. The prices of honey bee queens have been pretty stable for the past 15 years.
mattgrice · 2h ago
I think it is not a great analogy. As Jeremy Bentham wrote, “The question is not: can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But can they suffer?”
I have relatives that do or have raised bees (as a hobby). Can bees suffer? I don't know. I kind of think a bee can experience suffering in a small degree. I'm not going to run the experiments on that because I'm not a sociopath. Also arguably the hive is the basic unit of the honeybee organism, not the bee itself.
I do know for certain hogs can suffer. I'm a farm boy from Iowa. I've been around them from a young age and I hate everything about them. I hate the smell, I hate the way their meat tastes to me like they smell, I hate how if you are small enough and don't take care, they are mean enough to knock you down and eat you.
I'm probably one of the few people on HN who have actually experienced in person what a hog confinement facility looks and smells and sounds like. I wouldn't wish it on my worst hog enemy. It is a vision of hell, illegal to film in Iowa, and in no way comparable to how we treat bee hives.
tptacek · 1h ago
I am for complicated reasons unusually familiar with battery hog farms. I'm not making an ethical comparison; I'm just saying: ecologically speaking, American honey bees are an industrial product, not part of our fauna.
jibal · 1h ago
Yeah, that was an odd turn.
taeric · 3h ago
I mean, somewhat true, but probably a touch oversold? I don't think people putting in a single beehive are doing much to impact a neighborhood. Probably less than having a house cat. Which, is not nothing, but is not ecosystem changing, either.
I'm reminded of how much we were taught that monocrops were bad things in grade school. And yet, you'd be hard pressed to name a popular food that isn't grown in giant monocrop fields.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> probably a touch oversold? I don't think people putting in a single beehive are doing much to impact a neighborhood
Probably not, especially if they’re in an urban environment. The bees being shipped to farms, on the other hand, are ecologically destructive (as well as economically invaluable).
My takeaway is not that honeybees are evil. It’s that we need more pollinators in more stripes, and that the agricultural industry has successfully confused pollinators in general with honeybees in particular.
micromacrofoot · 2h ago
The damage is largely already done because the non-native bees are now a feral invasive species that have out competed natives, and the invasive honey bees haven't co-evolved to pollinate native plantlife
tptacek · 2h ago
My understanding is that there are in fact very few feral honey bee colonies in the US ("if you see a honey bee in your yard, chances are someone owns it") and at some points over the last 20 years feral honey bee colonies had essentially been eradicated by the Varroa mite.
0898 · 3h ago
So what you're saying is that honeybees just have good bee-R?
micromacrofoot · 2h ago
Yes thank you, we're supporting the wrong bees!
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> we're supporting the wrong bees
Our farms don’t work with bumblebees. Honeybees are fine. The problem is thinking we only need honeybees. We need more bees of all kinds. And in some cases, yes, that may mean fewer honeybees.
mushroomba · 4h ago
Modern beekeeping practices are a kind of factory-farming. Tim Rowe developed a method of beekeeping that takes advantage of evolution to improve the vitality of bees. It is described succinctly in his book, The Rose Hive Method. [1]
I, unfortunately, developed a severe bee-sting allergy, and can no longer put these ideas into practice. I anticipate that commercial beekeeping cannot sustain its current practices.
After one season of bee keeping I concluded the same thing. Its horrifying how poorly bees are treated in this industry to control parasites (forced exposure to acidic gas)
I sold my hives and will probably never buy honey again, much in the same way I avoid factory farmed meat.
Looking through this, beekeeping is a strange and interesting world that I know so little about. Cool!
ACCount36 · 2h ago
As always: if those ideas are so good, why aren't they used?
If existing practices are somehow radically worse, I would expect the first entity to adopt better practices to obtain a significant advantage - and the competition to copy them eventually.
I'm incredibly skeptical of any "everyone is doing X completely wrong and you should listen to ME and BUY MY BOOK instead".
Tadpole9181 · 36m ago
I have no idea how you could actually be confused about this.
- I can sell 100 units of product for $2. I feel good I am ethical and responsible.
- I can sell 300 units of product for $1. Everyone buys from me and I make more money, but I poison the land.
Capitalism does not account for externalities. Because businesses never have to pay the cost of poisoning water supplies or destroying ecosystems until he societal bell tolls - and because "if I don't, they will and I will go out of business" - unsustainable and unethical practices are the norm in late stage capitalism.
I mean, for real? Are you confused why mine operators encouraged taking more material at the expensive of structural integrity? Are you confused why gas barons don't like paying the cost to cap NG wells? Are you confused why big agri uses petrochemical fertilizers to grow subsidized ethanol and HFCS?
ACCount36 · 4m ago
Where's the externality here?
Isn't "vitality of bees" that this method claims to improve actually supposed to be desirable to beekeepers themselves?
miellaby · 3h ago
This article seems like fantasy fiction: 'We thought antibiotics were to blame, but actually, it's NO2.' (next 5G?) while it's widely recognized for the last ten years that the primary culprit is neonicotinoids: very potent and pervasive chemicals that accumulate in the biotope, killing all insects indiscriminately, contrary to the misleading claims made by the agro-industry.
imzadi · 4h ago
This seems like it would be the obvious outcome? If bee keepers have been keeping bees healthy by giving them antibiotics, then stopping the antibiotics would lead to them being less healthy? Especially since the previous antibiotic use would have killed off the healthy bacteria.
seunosewa · 3h ago
Yes, of course. The pretence of ignorance in the article is hilarious.
alionski · 3h ago
I wish the industry and governments spent an equal amount on battling the decline of wild bees. When they say "save the bees", it's not honeybees they mean. Honeybees are cattle.
tptacek · 3h ago
North American native bees tend not to form giant eusocial colonies and are less vulnerable to pathogens; their biggest threat (after habitat loss, of course) may in fact be honey bees.
mattgrice · 3h ago
I'm not saying anyone is doing 'enough' but neonicotinoid bans in EU are perhaps the most effective and 'costly' thing done so far. In Not that costs borne by poisoners
riffraff · 2h ago
The EU neonicotinoid ban seems potentially very useful but do we have data that it actually was effective?
horacemorace · 4h ago
I know I’m not the only one alarmed by the fact that we used to have to clean bug splats off our windshields weekly during the summer and now don’t. The downstream and parallel effects must be massive.
Hilift · 3h ago
I saw lightning bugs and dragon flies for the first time in a long time this year. Our county banned pesticides for residential and recreation areas.
sarchertech · 3h ago
I left a lot of the leaves on my lawn this year and only thinned out the spots where they were thick enough to kill the grass.
Huge increase in lightning bugs this summer.
FuriouslyAdrift · 2h ago
I reseeded my lawn with clover and saw a huge increase in all kinds of lightening bugs, bees, etc. Alos rabbits which surprised me (I'm in the middle of a dense urban area... there is a park nearby, though)
sarchertech · 1h ago
Nice! I forgot to mention that I also added microclover the the mix last fall. The bees love the little clover flowers.
packetlost · 3h ago
I'd be willing to bet this has more to do with more aerodynamic designs of cars than less bugs in general.
poncho_romero · 1h ago
I believe the same decrease is visible when driving older (less aerodynamic) cars, but I don’t have any studies on hand
Xss3 · 51m ago
...or just ask a bus driver, van driver, euro truck driver, etc.
They've all seen the decline too.
pamelafox · 2h ago
Yep, that observation is discussed frequently in the book "Insect Crisis". Highly recommend!
JLCarveth · 3h ago
I still get a large amount of bugs on the front of my car, makes me wish I had applied PPF.
deadbabe · 3h ago
This is actually due to evolution. Insect populations have evolved generation by generation such that the ones who avoid flying over roadways survive more often, and in time we end up with less bugs getting killed. Because the lifecycle of insects is very short, this can happen easily over the course of decades, enough to witness in one human lifetime.
tired-turtle · 3h ago
While this claim is plausible, it’s (admittedly pleasing) conjecture until you provide evidence.
deadbabe · 2h ago
I saw it myself, we did high speed off-roading and smashed a ton of bugs. But on the highway? Little to no bugs.
Xss3 · 52m ago
That doesn't prove anything. Disturbing burrowing bugs or bugs in grass and bushes with rumbling and lights is easily enough to account for a vast difference alone...Then consider the environment was more wild with more habitat space for bugs compared to a road...
deadbabe · 9m ago
I think it casts a reasonable doubt on the simple theory that wide spread use of pesticide somehow killed off enough bugs that we no longer have them hitting our windshields. If bug populations were dwindling you wouldn’t encounter them in the wild this way.
It’s more likely I think that most successful reproduction for the past century has increasingly been done by bugs who avoid flying over roads. There could be many reasons why they do this. Perhaps some sense the vast asphalt plain and prefer to stay in greener areas. Temperatures above roads in full sun are much hotter than above grass. Turbulence encountered by cars may encourage some bugs to seek calmer airspaces.
It’s not so simple as “pesticides”.
Bjartr · 3h ago
That's a neat possibility. Do you have any sources to share that go into more detail?
The reduction in windshield bug splats has more to do with the decline in insect populations.
EDIT: I originally said 75% decline over 30 years. Those are the results for studies in parts of Germany. We don't have solid data on global loss in insect populations.
hinkley · 3h ago
There's a degree to which aerodynamics play a role in the number of splats but the numbers are also definitely way down.
hadlock · 2h ago
We switched from a sedan with a very sloped windshield, to an SUV with a suprisingly upright windshield (one of the cartoonishly offroad mall crawlers). I've never had to scrape bugs off my windshield in my life before we bought the SUV but we go through a lot more windshield wiper fluid now than we did a couple months ago despite keeping the same driving patterns.
hinkley · 1h ago
Some of that design is about keeping pedestrians from going head-first through your windshield if you hit them. With the SUV the top of the hood is above the center of mass of the hypothetical pedestrian, whereas the sedan is below, and so they have to encourage the flying human to slide over the roof instead of go teeth first into your back seat.
That it helps with bugs is more of a happy coincidence.
Waterluvian · 3h ago
Anecdotally I also feel like I’ve notice a decline in windshield splat. But wouldn’t we notice severe bird population declines as well?
https://trends.ebird.org/ that's exactly what we do (and have been since we started poisoning with pesticides etc)
mc32 · 3h ago
It’s also possible some insects have learned to avoid certain corridors at certain altitude to avoid getting splattered.
Animals do adapt behavior to avoid new threats. Now, admittedly it’s just conjecture but I would not rule it out nor am I saying it would account for all windshield spat decline.
endo_bunker · 4h ago
Seems like they may not have realized that the fact that antibiotic use was associated with hive death could be because antibiotics are likely given primarily to unhealthy hives.
ceedan · 3h ago
I read something recently that colony collapse disorder was due to viruses transmitted by varroa mites and/or pesticides
Yes, and the mites (Varroa Destructor) found in the collapsed colonies were resistant to miticides.
While widespread antibiotic use is bad for bees it's nothing compared to what the viruses transmitted by the mites do to them.
giantg2 · 2h ago
Bacterial issues aren't that much of a concern for beekeepers. It can be used to treat European Foulbrood, but the only other issue is American Fouldbrood and that isn't treatable.
There are some interesting things being done in the biome research. Even stuff like bacteria related to mosquito dunks.
I always thought it was fascinating that Africanized honey bees ("killer bees") are the dominant honey bee in many regions of Central and South America for honey production.
animitronix · 3h ago
Yeah, cuz it's a pesticide problem not an antibiotic problem...
7734128 · 3h ago
Perhaps we should instead avoid antibeeotics?
Gnarl · 2h ago
Radiofrequency radiation
more_corn · 4h ago
Pesticides
frollogaston · 2h ago
Either my cmd+f is broken, or the study linked doesn't even mention that word.
morkalork · 4h ago
Not even mentioned in the article, which is strange because they're definitely a culprit. Which by the way, the ever expanding culture war is starting to seep into that space. There are neonicotinoids banned in Ontario, Québec but not Alberta (of course) and people getting around them by shipping inter provincially because the bans are "woke bullshit".
meneton · 3h ago
A lot of Research into colony collapse is funded by agrotech.
zahlman · 47m ago
> because the bans are "woke bullshit".
I assume you have a source to demonstrate that people actually use and express this reasoning?
bawolff · 2h ago
> There are neonicotinoids banned in Ontario, Québec but not Alberta (of course)
You say that like its purely due to AB gov's conservative bullshit. That may play a part, but it probably also has to do with how important canola is to ab economy (obviously still not a valid excuse, but maybe a better explanation)
9rx · 2h ago
> You say that like its purely due to AB gov's conservative bullshit.
What suggests "conservative government bullshit"? The NDP held power in Alberta when these regulations were coming into force elsewhere. That is about as far away from conservatism as it gets in Canada.
"Of course" no doubt refers to the fact that Health Canada found the culprit to be dust-off from pneumatic planters. Whereas the crops in Alberta are almost exclusively seeded with drills, which are quite different in design to a planter and don't exhibit the same dusting characteristics. In other words, they never had the same problem Ontario and Quebec had. — Not to mention that Health Canada had already updated regulations to require technical changes to planters to minimize/eliminate dust-off, so for what little planter use might be found in Alberta, Health Canada was already on top of it, leaving little reason for the province to step in.
Calling it a ban in Ontario and Quebec is what is misleading. Farmers had to become licensed to use them, but they were never banned. It was mostly theatre.
bee_rider · 4h ago
I think at this point we should admit that the culture war bullshit is the thing that most of the population is responding to, unfortunately. So now we have to wonder…
Are pesticides turning the bees depressed and non-virile? Woke pesticides are stealing your manliness?
No comments yet
deaddodo · 4h ago
A problem that’s been plaguing every nation in the world and been studied by the world’s top scientists for 20+ years now.
Nope, all a waste of time. We should’ve just asked “more_corn”.
smithkl42 · 3h ago
Am I the only one who was surprised and kind of mystified by this sentence?
"You’d assume the lessening of antibiotics might be associated with improved health outcomes, especially since antibiotics are so overused."
It sounds more like something coming from Robert Kennedy, or one of those cranks who refuse to take antibiotics to treat strep throat, than from a mainstream researcher. Like, OF COURSE populations treated with antibiotics are going to do better in the period of a study like this. Under what plausible theory could you expect otherwise?
That's not to say that antiobiotics are an unmitigated good! I get that they have weird and complex downstream ramifications. It's just that those aren't the ramifications you'd expect to be able to measure from a study like this.
colechristensen · 3h ago
Ugh no. There is a difference between treating a diagnosed condition with antibiotics and just regularly giving all livestock consistent doses as a preventative.
Drugs aren't just "take it and everything will be improved regardless of the situation". Better to think of them as carefully used poison, good but only when used wisely.
The 1950s vibe of sterilizing everything needs to be done.
hinkley · 3h ago
Livestock aren't given low level antibiotics as a prophylactic. They're given as an alternative to growth hormones. Antibiotic consumption gives you bigger cows.
That's the ugliest part of this whole thing. We aren't trying to keep animals safe, we are trying to keep the cost of hamburgers down even if it means people dying of incurable infections in hospitals.
colechristensen · 39m ago
>Livestock aren't given low level antibiotics as a prophylactic.
Yes they are. Sub-theraputic doses are used to increase weight gain, higher doses are also used as a prophylactic.
Honeybees aren’t native to North America [2]. The native pollinators, such as bumblebees, are outcompeted by honeybee hives [3]. Those honeybees then selectively pollinate certain plants, reducing biodiversity further [4].
Honeybees, however, unlike local pollinators, can be industrially distributed to industrial agriculture. So they get a lobby. Meanwhile, well-meaning folks put a honey beehive in their backyard and inadvertently wipe out the local bumblebee and butterfly populations.
[1] https://uwnps.org/event/6-26-25/
[2] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/are-honey-bees-native-north-americ...
[3] https://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/em-9524-impact-bee...
[4] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002...
It's VERY easy to create homes for these guys - if you've ever seen someone with a large log that has lots of little holes drilled in it, they were likely prepping a Mason Bee habitat. Ideally, they burrow into hollow, dry grass stems that broke off at some point in the fall.
I try to tell people about this bee because it's so easy to make homes for them. Just make sure to move the home every year, or it becomes too easy for predators to find them.
edit: also worth mentioning this bee is so docile, it usually only stings when it's squeezed or wet, and its sting is very light, and the hook is unbarbed. Better than honey bees in so many ways.
It looks like some folks use them for berries though: https://backyardbeekeeping.iamcountryside.com/plants-pollina...
We have some of those in our wild crazy yard. I gotta build me some homes for them because you're right they are so cute.
To use a silicon valley analogy, nobody has figured out how to scale out mason bees. Not to the > 200sq miles of pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds owned by the Resnicks. The Resnicks funded some in-house research and apparently considred it a failure.
It's probably possible. Might not even be hard once you know the trick, but it's certainly not a slam-dunk.
My current fav is the Fine Striped Sweat Bee, where the females are 100% turquoise. Dazzling! https://bsky.app/profile/pamelafox.bsky.social/post/3lv3eycl...
My only problem is the invasive plants which are determined to overwhelm everything.
I recently learned that a popular anti-mosquito trick by painters in my area is to put a fake dragonfly on their cap. Which led me to wonder where the actual buggers have gone.
I love this.
... in urban environments, and it' still debatable. Your #2 source provides additional details.
There are a lot of other dubious claims here that the sources seemed to contradict each other.
Something you didn't bring up is that people raising honeybee can benefit other pollinators due to changes in human behavior such as planting beneficial plants and refraining from pesticide use.
In all environments.
The source argues this competition is fine in urban environments because we’ve already displaced the native pollinators there.
Do you mean No. 3, the Oregon State University article?
No. 2, the USGS article, explicitly says "honey bees are also significant competitors of native bees and should not be introduced in conservation areas, parks, or areas where you want to foster the conservation of native plants and native bees."
(As for the Oregan State University article, the word rural never appears. It's focussed on urban areas, where honeybees have a smaller foraging radius and native bees are largely extinct. The carrying capacity argument only applies "during periods of abundant pollen and nectar.")
"Only half of the studies pointed to a negative impact of competition, and most of the negative impacts were studies where wild bees changed their visitation rate on certain flowers. It has yet to be demonstrated how competition may result in a long-term change in the composition of bee species in an environment."
You wouldn't find the term rural because they use the term wildlands.
The studies used in the Oregon article are not all urban focused and included studies investigating increased competition in varying habitat, finding "As the California study demonstrated, increased competition may cause bee species to switch their foraging patterns, resulting in little impact on their overall reproductive success."
And yes, any conservation area will not promote the inclusion of non-native species regardless of their impact. Just becuase they are competitors doesn't show that they have negative impacts.
Do we have evidence backyard beekeeping promotes these behaviours better than directly messaging folks to plant pollinator-friendly gardens? (Genuine question.)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/how-bee-...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8569223/
The billionaire Resinick pomegranate/pistachoi/almond oligarchs put quite a bit of effort into native bees which seemed quite successful but they shut it down I think about 5 years ago. I can't find the article now. Gen X+ might remember them as owners of the 'Franklin Mint' hawkers of knickknacks you either are or soon will be throwing into a dumpster.
They are BTW also largest renters of honeybee hives in the US.
I have relatives that do or have raised bees (as a hobby). Can bees suffer? I don't know. I kind of think a bee can experience suffering in a small degree. I'm not going to run the experiments on that because I'm not a sociopath. Also arguably the hive is the basic unit of the honeybee organism, not the bee itself.
I do know for certain hogs can suffer. I'm a farm boy from Iowa. I've been around them from a young age and I hate everything about them. I hate the smell, I hate the way their meat tastes to me like they smell, I hate how if you are small enough and don't take care, they are mean enough to knock you down and eat you.
I'm probably one of the few people on HN who have actually experienced in person what a hog confinement facility looks and smells and sounds like. I wouldn't wish it on my worst hog enemy. It is a vision of hell, illegal to film in Iowa, and in no way comparable to how we treat bee hives.
I'm reminded of how much we were taught that monocrops were bad things in grade school. And yet, you'd be hard pressed to name a popular food that isn't grown in giant monocrop fields.
Probably not, especially if they’re in an urban environment. The bees being shipped to farms, on the other hand, are ecologically destructive (as well as economically invaluable).
My takeaway is not that honeybees are evil. It’s that we need more pollinators in more stripes, and that the agricultural industry has successfully confused pollinators in general with honeybees in particular.
Our farms don’t work with bumblebees. Honeybees are fine. The problem is thinking we only need honeybees. We need more bees of all kinds. And in some cases, yes, that may mean fewer honeybees.
I, unfortunately, developed a severe bee-sting allergy, and can no longer put these ideas into practice. I anticipate that commercial beekeeping cannot sustain its current practices.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18279124-the-rose-hive-m...
If existing practices are somehow radically worse, I would expect the first entity to adopt better practices to obtain a significant advantage - and the competition to copy them eventually.
I'm incredibly skeptical of any "everyone is doing X completely wrong and you should listen to ME and BUY MY BOOK instead".
- I can sell 100 units of product for $2. I feel good I am ethical and responsible.
- I can sell 300 units of product for $1. Everyone buys from me and I make more money, but I poison the land.
Capitalism does not account for externalities. Because businesses never have to pay the cost of poisoning water supplies or destroying ecosystems until he societal bell tolls - and because "if I don't, they will and I will go out of business" - unsustainable and unethical practices are the norm in late stage capitalism.
I mean, for real? Are you confused why mine operators encouraged taking more material at the expensive of structural integrity? Are you confused why gas barons don't like paying the cost to cap NG wells? Are you confused why big agri uses petrochemical fertilizers to grow subsidized ethanol and HFCS?
Isn't "vitality of bees" that this method claims to improve actually supposed to be desirable to beekeepers themselves?
Huge increase in lightning bugs this summer.
They've all seen the decline too.
It’s more likely I think that most successful reproduction for the past century has increasingly been done by bugs who avoid flying over roads. There could be many reasons why they do this. Perhaps some sense the vast asphalt plain and prefer to stay in greener areas. Temperatures above roads in full sun are much hotter than above grass. Turbulence encountered by cars may encourage some bugs to seek calmer airspaces.
It’s not so simple as “pesticides”.
The reduction in windshield bug splats has more to do with the decline in insect populations.
EDIT: I originally said 75% decline over 30 years. Those are the results for studies in parts of Germany. We don't have solid data on global loss in insect populations.
That it helps with bugs is more of a happy coincidence.
https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/agricultural-intensification-dr...
Animals do adapt behavior to avoid new threats. Now, admittedly it’s just conjecture but I would not rule it out nor am I saying it would account for all windshield spat decline.
https://www.ars.usda.gov/news-events/news/research-news/2025...
While widespread antibiotic use is bad for bees it's nothing compared to what the viruses transmitted by the mites do to them.
There are some interesting things being done in the biome research. Even stuff like bacteria related to mosquito dunks.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01476...
I assume you have a source to demonstrate that people actually use and express this reasoning?
You say that like its purely due to AB gov's conservative bullshit. That may play a part, but it probably also has to do with how important canola is to ab economy (obviously still not a valid excuse, but maybe a better explanation)
What suggests "conservative government bullshit"? The NDP held power in Alberta when these regulations were coming into force elsewhere. That is about as far away from conservatism as it gets in Canada.
"Of course" no doubt refers to the fact that Health Canada found the culprit to be dust-off from pneumatic planters. Whereas the crops in Alberta are almost exclusively seeded with drills, which are quite different in design to a planter and don't exhibit the same dusting characteristics. In other words, they never had the same problem Ontario and Quebec had. — Not to mention that Health Canada had already updated regulations to require technical changes to planters to minimize/eliminate dust-off, so for what little planter use might be found in Alberta, Health Canada was already on top of it, leaving little reason for the province to step in.
Calling it a ban in Ontario and Quebec is what is misleading. Farmers had to become licensed to use them, but they were never banned. It was mostly theatre.
Are pesticides turning the bees depressed and non-virile? Woke pesticides are stealing your manliness?
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Nope, all a waste of time. We should’ve just asked “more_corn”.
"You’d assume the lessening of antibiotics might be associated with improved health outcomes, especially since antibiotics are so overused."
It sounds more like something coming from Robert Kennedy, or one of those cranks who refuse to take antibiotics to treat strep throat, than from a mainstream researcher. Like, OF COURSE populations treated with antibiotics are going to do better in the period of a study like this. Under what plausible theory could you expect otherwise?
That's not to say that antiobiotics are an unmitigated good! I get that they have weird and complex downstream ramifications. It's just that those aren't the ramifications you'd expect to be able to measure from a study like this.
Drugs aren't just "take it and everything will be improved regardless of the situation". Better to think of them as carefully used poison, good but only when used wisely.
The 1950s vibe of sterilizing everything needs to be done.
That's the ugliest part of this whole thing. We aren't trying to keep animals safe, we are trying to keep the cost of hamburgers down even if it means people dying of incurable infections in hospitals.
Yes they are. Sub-theraputic doses are used to increase weight gain, higher doses are also used as a prophylactic.